27 Oct 2005
Jon Johansen posted a month or two ago about some HD trailers a guy called Ben Waggoner put together of The Island (with permission from Warner Bros, it’s all good :)).
I grabbed the more recent, 8Mbps VBR followup test. This is 1920×1080 stuff, no interlaced crap. To put things in perspective, this 1 minute 42 second trailer is roughly 100MB.
Quick summary, it works like this: gstreamer crapped out, mplayer wouldn’t start a lot, VLC kept crashing, xine puts in a great performance. mplayer was pretty good, too, when I tried enough times to get it to startup properly and play stuff… so long as I didn’t ‘jog’ the track or anything (I love the OSD that it and xine do, though… very nice.)
Running with xine, X.org and xine sat at 97% usage (split roughly 55/45… yeah, everything else was pretty much idle) on my Athlon 2200+ (1.8GHz) — and that was with the MPEG2 version. The WMV version worked well on a 3GHzish Pentium 4 built for playing back video… but it looked like crap coz it was hooked up to a display at not-quite-native resolution (the display is a very expensive piece of crap. Not my fault.) On my desktop, however, the WMV version would only start to load.
Actually, that’s not quite true. mplayer would play vision (with lots of dropped frames) all the way through, but ignore audio, xine would play jerky audio and no video (well, it’d grab the first frame and stick with that on display), and gstreamer wasn’t even game to try.
The Real Video 4/Cook Audio version was an interesting one. mplayer would play audio smoothly for a few seconds, then cut out, then play video smoothly to catch up, then audio would catch up, etc. Never both at once! And, strangely, it decided to try and display this version in 4:3 (the trailer is 16:9, and it detects that fine with all other versions). xine played video smoothly at about half speed (as in, consistently half, no obviously dropped frames), but had no audio. Possibly a codec thing, but I thought mplayer and xine were using the same w32codecs package here. Could be wrong. VLC took a look at the file and gave up (it didn’t crash, it just sat there expecting attention as it normally does. I’m no fan, can you tell?), whilst gstreamer was typically competent. (Typically for it, of course, meaning “did nothing.”)
Everything could play the MPEG2 version fine… except for the usual suspects, though performance wasn’t quite so bad this time. gstreamer was pretty poor, cutting out regularly, but VLC managed an almost-acceptable performance — its only fault was occasional slowness between high-motion frames, and loss of A/V sync. (Heh, I’m glad it managed to play this one. I don’t think I’d ever seen VLC successfully play video before. Well, aside from boring 320×240 stuff, anyway.)
The MOV was the worst in terms of all-round support. VLC played the AAC audio track fine, and only the first frame of video. Everything else choked, because the Linux drivers aren’t ready for Apple’s H.264 implementation (which, rumour has it, is crap anyway. Not that this makes a difference, seeing as they publish most of the world’s trailers — we’re all going to clamour to see them, just coz they’re in sexy HD), and neither mplayer nor xine separate streams like VLC does (at least, that’s what it looks like. I don’t really know :P). gstreamer I have no great idea about.
The quality was… very impressive. As in, I couldn’t fault it :P This is what I imagined DVD to be like before I actually encountered it, though, because they marketed the crap out of it even when the product itself was thoroughly mediocre. Aside from the digital/multi-channel audio and extra features thing, DVD really doesn’t do it for me in terms of quality… because it’s (often fairly heavily) compressed, medium-resolution MPEG2 (maxing out at 720×480, IIRC).
Incidentally, that’s one reason why I’m glad this whole HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray thing seems to be going Blu-Ray’s way: hopefully, the extra space will mean that content producers are less likely to compress things too badly anymore, and we’ll actually enjoy the benefits of the format. With Blu-Ray’s highest test and theoretical limits more than double what HD DVD has achieved, I’m looking forward to some absolutely awesome quality video in the not-too-distant future. (Sure, it’ll be another five years til I can afford it, but meh!) Here’s a good comparison of the two from Engadget.
I’m currently torrenting the 18Mbps version… if I don’t post about it, it’s possibly because my computer exploded in a fireball large enough to engulf me when trying to process massive amounts of video information.
Whoa, no, it works fine. Admittedly, my computer can do absolutely nothing else at the same time, including resize the window, but it’s still not a bad thing. Quality is pretty much imperceptibly different (or, I think it might be better, but can’t really say for certain — placebo effect and all that –, so I’m not going to).
27 Oct 2005
Cameron Adams just wrote a piece on form focus with Javascript, because “your index finger has a finite number of clicks in it”
. His solution works, but comment #1 was a more concise and pragmatic solution.
Good stuff, though I’m uncertain as to whether I should use it here on the search field or on comment forms.
26 Oct 2005
Both when it comes to 20th century international relations and technology companies.
http://lists.slug.org.au/archives/slug/2004/04/msg00133.html
Ironically, I was looking for that software so I could see what could be done away from a MS Windows live production environment (for an event mid-December this year). As it stands, I’m downloading Dyne:bolic from another source (GNU.org’s US FTP server, actually. One of Bigpond’s more often-saturated links), and will post here once I’ve figured out if it’s worth “the risk” of using. And again if/when it gets used.
My biggest concern is it’s not going to like various TV-out hardware on the two computers I want to use it on. Actually, it only needs to work on one — the other is up to Ubuntu, but the software will be much the same. And yes, I now trust Ubuntu enough… kind of. Breezy is ridiculously stable, though its multimedia performance can be a bit lacklustre. I’m blaming the TNT2, though, and figure it’ll pick up lots if I stick a GeForce 6600 in it. Failing that… I’ll probably use a laptop, or something else boring.
Basically, I want the Dyne:bolic box to be a playback machine, and the Ubuntu box is just gonna sit there and feed a nice static graphic (or maybe an animated logo, if I get bored). The Ubuntu box will be my desktop, because, whilst it’s fine for WWW stuff and the spot of word-processing… I have too much crap installed on it. Contrary to popular opinion, Windows is far easier to trim services/background apps on for extra speed than Linux on the desktop is. The amount of crap Gnome/Ximian/Nautilus leaves lying around is truly disgusting if you ever want to try and stop all the processes and just have something work on its own. I could launch into a failsafe X session and just run what I want from there, I guess… always a possibility. Can’t do that on Windows (if someone says “safe mode” I might stab them).
If anyone feels like lending me a vision mixer (or well-specc’d computer!) for a weekend in December… *looks strangely optimistic* Yeah, okay. Well, if anyone can get me a good deal on a vision mixer (MX-50 is my friend) for a weekend in December…
(Yeah, I’ve checked Digihire. They’re nice people, but cheaper would be better. Church/non-profit event.)
26 Oct 2005
I haven’t been running much lately, because… I’m lazy. And there are exams on. And I’d much rather procrastinate passively. Or something. I don’t know, I don’t really have any good excuses.
There is, however, something that would probably make me want to run more. This ridiculously cool GPS training device! It’s like… hey… you’re a geek. And you want to run. With gimmicks that are arguably useful. Buy me, buy me!
Somehow, though, at $US330ish plus shipping, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The solution? Start jogging with a backpack and take a car GPS unit (already have one)!
Yeah, not terribly likely, either. Ah well. Hopefully The Trip to New Zealand coming up (have I mentioned that online yet? Geez… maybe not… how bad) will serve to kinda remedy the whole lack-of-exercise situation and create a habit for when I get back. If I haven’t mentioned that on this site before (I don’t remember doing that, I don’t think I have), then… consider this notice. I’m going to NZ from Saturday the 12th of November until Monday the 5th of December. Tori leaves to go to England on November 10, so that’ll be distraction enough after finishing the exams and just before packing… and hopefully NZ will be enough of a distraction for me to not realise she’s on the other side of the planet for a while (and vice versa, I imagine…)
I’m planning on taking lots of photos, but haven’t decided which camera to take yet. Or, more accurately, how many I will take. I’m definitely planning on taking my Pentax SP500 w/ 28-70mm lens, but don’t know whether my little Pentax qualifies. I can see it either getting broken or full very quickly. Contemplating getting a harddrive-based reader thingo (something like this HD-DM40 from Anyware, about $215 from a retailer), but quite uncertain. It’s just more stuff to carry in a backpack that’s already going to be substantially full.
Plus, as I’ve told some people before, I like film grain. It looks nice. Far nicer than digital compression artifacts or the sensor crapping out in low light conditions. One of Hayley’s photos on year12.joahua.com demonstrates this nicely, because it’s not a good photo, but it’s very nice and characterful… mostly, I think, because it was shot on film not digital.
So, I can live with my own inability to use a camera perfectly meaning I get a handful of blurry shots, and it costing a little more to get photos developed/make mistakes. The question is, should I have a secondary camera for quick photos that I can check the quality of immediately, just in case? I could probably drop my SP500 in water and it’d survive after a [probably quite expensive] service… I can’t say the same thing for the digital. Funnily enough, the tiny digital would ultimately take up nearly as much space as the chunky SLR, because it would mean I’d be carrying a charger for its batteries, a hard drive, and a charger for the hard drive, as well as the camera itself. I could just not use the hard drive and try to find a net cafe, but that’s something I’d rather not rely on. I could also buy another SD card or two before we leave… which is a distinct possibility, given how cheap those things are getting (I saw a 256MB card for under $30 yesterday, and wasn’t even looking. 512MB cards can be had for under $50). Problematically, they’re absolutely tiny and I can just see myself losing one.
Suggestions, anyone?
26 Oct 2005
F-Spot is a photo management/cataloguing thing from the Gnome project that looks cool. Another reason to love Gnome! Note particularly the cool timeline thing in the screenshot on their site. I don’t know if I’ll start using it yet, but it looks cool. Assuming I don’t eventually wind up on iPhoto, this is probably going to become a mainstay of my day-to-day computing life if development on it continues (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t).
Obligatory geek aside: Look, it’s written in C# and uses Mono! (yeah, I realise I’m linking to my own comment. Not just a vanity trip, it is actually relevant!)